Local Blogs

By Elena Kadvany

Corner Bakery Cafe opens in Palo Alto

Uploaded: Oct 9, 2013

For those of you who are growing weary of (or simply can't afford) the influx of overpriced food and drink in Palo Alto ? the $10 haute hamburgers, $4+ tacos, $10+ cocktails ? here's some good news: a restaurant where the most expensive item tops out at $8.99.

I'm talking about Corner Bakery Cafe, a chain outpost that opened Monday, Oct. 7, at the corner of El Camino Real and Fernando Avenue in Palo Alto's Ventura neighborhood. The restaurant does breakfast, lunch and dinner all day, fast and at decent prices.

The menu is vast ? egg dishes, breakfast sandwiches, buttermilk pancakes, oatmeal, paninis, deli sandwiches, salads, pastas and soups, all of which are made to order. Picky eaters, rejoice: They're also into substitutions at Corner Bakery Cafe, so you can customize the heck out of your salad or sandwich if your heart so desires.

Oh, and the average amount of time it takes to get any one of these dishes out of the kitchen? Less than five minutes, said John Sweeney, general manager of operations for Buon Hospitality, the company that operates the Corner Bakery Cafe franchises.

The Palo Alto outpost is part of a franchise agreement between Buon Hospitality and Corner Bakery Cafe to build a whopping 32 restaurants in the Bay Area in the next seven years. Palo Alto is the third Bay location, following Pleasanton and Pleasant Hill (and 150 other franchised locations in the rest of the country).